Unlike most law school students nearing the end of whatcan be a less than enjoyable experience, I spent my final semester living and
working in the southern Caribbean region of Costa Rica. This experience was life-changing and led to the establishment of The Rich
Coast Project, a community storytelling and
collective history project aimed at supporting and protecting the cultural
heritage of coastal Afro-Caribbean populations and other communities living
along Costa Rica’s Talamanca coast.

In an effort to learn more about the challenges facing communities
in coastal Talamanca, I began interviewing people about their history, the
precarious state of land tenure, and the threat this poses to their cultural
survival. I quickly realized there was a story to be told – one that asks how
environmental conservation measures can and should be balanced against the
needs and rights of local communities. Better yet, how could these measures
include the communities and incorporate the knowledge and best practices they
have gained over centuries of stewardship to these lands?

Coastal Talamanca is a place that, until relatively
recently, lived in virtual isolation, nestled between the lush forests of the
Talamanca Mountains to the West and the Caribbean Sea to the East. English
speaking Afro-Caribbean fishermen began settling this coastline beginning in
the early 1800s, and built their communities where they lived and worked:
right next to the water.

Paula Palmer’s seminal folk history book, What Happen, traces the history and traditions of the area’s people up
until 1979, the year of the book’s publication. Around the same time, the
construction of a road connected these small towns to the larger port city of
Limón and, by extension, to the rest of the world. Modern developments brought drastic
and rapid change – both positive and negative – to the daily reality of area
residents.

Costa Rica has developed an admirable policy imperative to
protect and conserve its vast natural resources and has established itself as
an international
leader on environmental issues. As this
reputation has grown, so have the instability of land tenure and economic insecurity
of the people living within the country’s vast protected areas.

Over
the past several years, local landowners in coastal Talamanca have been
stripped of their property rights and economic development has been paralyzed.
Homes and businesses have been threatened with demolition orders and residents
have faced criminal charges for pursuing better lives for their families.

The Rich Coast Project wants to make sure that these
communities have a chance to tell their own story. Our goal is to work within these communities to combine
storytelling, visual advocacy, and interdisciplinary research to update their
recorded history, expose their present situation, and explore their hopes for
the future of their children and neighbors.

To do so, we’re
teaming with local residents, socially-engaged artists, and scholars from a
range of disciplines to explore better approaches to the competing aims of
environmental conservation and sustainable development through the example of
this community’s experience. Law
students at Northeastern University are researching
the issue from Boston, and our partners at the Center for Digital Storytelling will help us work with local advocates to produce a collective
memory of the area and its people through a community storytelling initiative. Experts and students in archival
studies will help us develop a digital community archive to
ensure that those stories have a home forever, even if the communities do not.

This winter a small
team of researchers and filmmakers will join local residents to launch the
community storytelling initiative and continue the collection of documents for
the community archive. We’ll be taking our lead from the locals, letting the
community drive the development of the project and considering how this
approach – combining local storytelling with legal research – can be leveraged
to support other communities in different parts of the world.

Contact
us. We are seeking partnerships that can help us maximize
the potential impact of our work. If you’re an interested organization,
grantmaker, media outlet, creative professional, academic, or anyone with good
ideas, we want to meet you!

Join our volunteer
network to get involved. We are looking for folks who are
passionate about protecting local communities and cultural heritage, and
interested in the future success of The Rich Coast Project and similar
initiatives.

The Rich
Coast Project is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for
the charitable purposes of The Rich Coast Project must be made payable to
“Fractured Atlas” only and are tax‐deductible to the extent permitted by law.